What to do with A LOT of eggs

Yes, even in the winter my chickens are laying. The light in the coop helps a lot, but frankly they lay more when they get to run around the yard and cluck at the snow. Either way, I had 27 eggs in the ‘fridge tonight which means I needed to bake something.

Saturday mornings my kids will forget to eat breakfast until about lunchtime unless I try to adhere to their school-day schedules and pull them into the kitchen. Given that I’m not much of a morning person and I like to practice yoga on Saturday mornings, this requires a bit of planning.

An easy solution for both problems is Southern Baked French Toast. I don’t know why it’s a Southern Dish, since it seems to be a practical use of pain perdu(old, stale bread) in just about every country for millennia. It must be all the cream, sugar and pecans that many recipes require.

My French bread was not exactly stale, but it was an impulse purchase from the “day old cart” at my local grocer. I cut it up into uniformly sliced rounds about 1/2 an inch thick and dipped them in an egg and milk mixture, placed them in a casserole dish (this is Minnesota, after all), and dusted them generously with cinnamon and sugar. Then I poured the remaining egg mixture over the bread, covered it, and put it in the ‘fridge. Tomorrow I’ll remove it and let it warm up on the counter while the oven preheats to 350 degrees and bake it for about 45 minutes.

So what’s in the egg mixture? Nine eggs and some milk (sorry I didn’t measure, but I think it was at least 2 cups). You want this mixture to really soak into the bread, so when I bake my French toast, I use more milk than I ordinarily would.